Cha Opens Section 8 Lists For Latinos

Settlement Admits To Failures In Past

April 23, 1996|By Melita Marie Garza, Tribune Staff Writer.

In what was called a "breakthrough" legal settlement that could alter the face of public housing in Chicago, the Chicago Housing Authority announced Monday that it has agreed to open its waiting lists to thousands of Latinos previously excluded from Section 8 housing programs.

The agreement settles a class-action lawsuit filed against the CHA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1994 by Latinos United, a non-profit fair housing group and other Latino plaintiffs. The suit was filed on behalf of Latinos eligible for public housing.

Currently, 48,000 Hispanic families from the city's half-million Hispanic population have incomes below the poverty level and would be eligible for such housing. Latinos make up 25 percent of the population available for public housing, but occupy only slightly more than 2 percent of the units in use.

Within five years, the settlement is expected to bring Latino participation in the Section 8 program up to 7 percent.

In the settlement, the CHA admitted that it had updated its Section 8 waiting lists by purging Latino applicants who failed to respond to letters sent in English. The CHA also admitted that the letters had no Spanish-language instructions and no information about where to ask questions in Spanish.

The CHA also admitted that it had failed to follow HUD procedures and market its programs in Spanish to the Latino community. It also admitted that it had never fulfilled a 1989 agreement with the Chicago Coalition for Fair Housing to market its programs to the Latino community.

`This is a tremendous breakthrough for the Latino community," said CHA Executive Director Joseph Shuldiner. "For the CHA, it shows that we will move aggressively to eliminate discrimination."

Families who receive the Section 8 vouchers pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent to private landlords. An eligible family with two children can get a two-bedroom apartment; a family with three or four children can get a three-bedroom apartment.

In the consent decree, the CHA, while denying wrongdoing, said it would not object if the court found that it had violated Latinos' civil rights.

According to the agreement, the CHA will develop a separate Section 8 waiting list composed of Latino families who would have applied before the 1985 closing of the Section 8 Family waiting list if they had known the program existed.

The new Latino list also would include elderly and disabled Latino residents who would have applied before the 1994 closing of the Section 8 elderly waiting list if they had been informed of that program.

"The inclusion of Latinos means that some (of the other racial groups) already on the list may have to wait longer to receive a voucher, but not any longer than they would have had it not been for CHA's discriminatory practices," said Carlos DeJesus, executive director of Latinos United.

Hispanics will be selected from the Latino registration list in proportion to their population living in poverty during that year.

For example, in 1983, Latinos were about 18 percent of Chicagoans living below the poverty level, so they would get about 18 percent of the vouchers distributed to registrants who applied in 1983, providing there are enough eligible Latinos on the list.

The remaining 82 percent of applicants would be selected from the original waiting list.

The CHA also agreed to reinstate to the waiting list Latinos who had been purged because of language barriers.

There are now 47,000 people on the CHA Section 8 waiting list; Latinos account for only 1 percent of them.

There are about 17,000 vouchers in use in Chicago, and each year about 10 percent of those become available as families move from the city or become ineligible for the program.

Latinos United estimated that the settlement would allow 400 new Latino families to participate in the Section 8 program each year for the next five years. The number of Latino families participating would increase from 1,111 now to 3,611 in five years.

Latinos United estimated the settlement would cost the CHA about $68 million to implement. The CHA's Shuldiner said the cost was difficult to assess but would not defray resources from other HUD projects.

HUD settled its portion of the lawsuit last May, agreeing to allocate to Hispanic applicants 500 new Section 8 vouchers, worth about $19 million, and provide more than $1 million in counseling to help Latinos use the vouchers.

The CHA portion of the suit was more difficult to settle in part, said Shuldiner, "because nobody understood how the CHA operated its Section 8 voucher system."

"When the program worked, it worked for certain people," Shuldiner said.

"Sometimes they took from the waiting list, sometimes they took from their grocery list."

In December, however, the CHA privatized its Section 8 program.

"It's my great hope that we now have folks at CHA that not only want to do the right thing, but who know how to do the right thing," Shuldiner said.